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Publishing & research

Scholarly content lives or dies on its metadata

A journal article is discovered through indexes, aggregators and citation graphs far more often than through a website visit. The platform's real job is to emit clean, complete, machine-readable records — and then be readable for the humans who arrive.

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Delivered in this sector

Real projects, linked. Nothing on this page is stock sector copy.

The problem

Where research platforms fall short

Problems specific to journals, indexes and research bodies.

  1. Metadata is incomplete or inconsistent

    Missing DOIs, author identifiers that vary between articles, inconsistent date formats, no structured affiliation. Each gap reduces how reliably the work is matched, cited and indexed, and none of them raise an error anywhere.

  2. Articles exist only as PDFs

    A PDF cannot be read well on a phone, is often inaccessible to screen readers, and gives search engines far less to work with than a full-text HTML version. The PDF should be the download, not the article.

  3. Deep archives are not crawlable

    Thousands of records behind a search form that produces no linkable URLs. If an engine cannot walk the archive, most of the corpus is effectively unpublished.

  4. Submission and review run on email

    Manuscripts, reviewer comments and revisions scattered across inboxes. Editors lose track, authors chase, and nobody can report on turnaround times.

  5. Accessibility is assumed, not tested

    Academic and institutional audiences include a high proportion of assistive-technology users, and funder or institutional policies increasingly require conformance. Equations, tables and figures are where most platforms fail.

The proof

We have shipped this already

A research indexing platform we designed and built.

Outcome figures are published only where the client has confirmed them. Where you see none, we did not have a number we could stand behind. See all work · How we approach search

What we would do

The services that move the needle in publishing & research

Research platforms need structural rigour more than visual flourish.

Publishing & Research FAQs

What people ask us first

The questions that come up on nearly every call in this sector, answered the way we would answer them on the phone.

Ask us something else

Can you work with DOIs, ORCID and Crossref deposits?

Yes. We model the metadata fields these require as first-class, validated parts of the article record rather than free-text boxes, and wire up deposit where your membership allows it. The principle is that an article cannot be published missing a field an index will need.

Should we publish full text as HTML as well as PDF?

Yes, where your production workflow can support it. Full-text HTML is far more accessible, far better on mobile, and gives search and AI systems the actual content rather than an opaque file. Keep the PDF as the citable, printable artefact alongside it.

We have twenty years of back issues. Can they be migrated?

Usually. How cleanly depends on what metadata exists for the older material — if volume, issue, page range and author data are recorded somewhere structured, the migration is mechanical. Where only PDFs survive, part of the work becomes recovering metadata, and we will scope that honestly after looking at a sample.

Do you build peer-review workflows?

We build the editorial side on WordPress where the process is relatively light — submission, assignment, revision rounds, decision. For high-volume journals with complex policies, a dedicated system such as OJS is usually the better home, and we build the public-facing platform around it.

Other industries we build for

Send us a sample record

One article with whatever metadata you hold for it. That tells us more about the build than a brief does.

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